Once more Mr. Lomborg sets out to obfuscate and confuse. Who are all these environmentalists "proposing an immense global campaign to cut down and burn trees"? Indeed if one looks hard you may find a preponderance of loggers and forestry engineers.
Because of the complexity of the electrical grid sun shining and wind blowing is not the problem these deniers (Mr. Lomborg is indeed an agw denier) claim it to be. In fact solar is a welcome addition to the grid because it mainly produces power during peak demand periods.
When forests are clear cut to produce energy, or indeed any use, the hit to our greenhouse gas budget ti huge, but not so in a responsible forest management situation. These forests are often not on good agricultural land.
I am not in favor of biomass in any situation, but the criticism of biomass just deceives us into thinking the burning of biomass is equivalent to the burning of fossil fuels.Wrong

If something always fails to address a problem (or makes it work), and you continue to do it, either you are insane, you enjoy failure, or you are out of ideas and desperate. Assuming it is the last, then what we desperately need here is a paradigm shift.

The scenario is: we have this huge ecological problem (among others of hardly less import) in supporting our present level of production/consumption, and we see don't seem to have a workable solution to permit continuation of this present level.

Let's break a bit of a taboo block on creativity here and start thinking, maybe we could massively lower production and consumption. We could start with needless duplication of product and negative competition, designed obsolescence rather than design for optimum whole life, media creation of artificial needs, and so forth. This alone would solve 90%+ of the problem. In fact, this may bring us within the natural healing capacity of the planet and it might not be necessary to do anything else.

We really need to realize, as Prof. Lomborg seems to wisely point out, is that such keep- the-(needless)-party-going schemes are providing simplistic linear models into a vastly complex, nonlinear, interdependent reality. The names of this game is entropy under the rug, chaos, or Murphy's law. But anyway you slice it, certainly anything that you don't know about, can go wrong and WILL go wrong. And there is plenty we don't know about, on so many levels, till we find out again the empirical hard way.

And if we keep doing this, the we best all go out and buy 7 billion shirts that say "I with Stupid."

The post is misleading. The biomass the developed countries means to use come from poultry and cattle litter or wood chips from wood-work scratch and from forest-cleaning, and not from free standing forests like. Please don't fool down the readers, who are these "environmentalists proposing an immense global campaign to cut down and burn trees"? Fact-sheets and links, please

At the moment we are coming up with random ideas without any foundations.
We are running in circles, trying, dismissing then again re-trying the same things in a futile, vicious cycle.
We do not even have a chance of getting it right while we continue existing within our own illusorical, artificial bubble we created to fulfill our excessive. unnecessary and unnatural demands best showcased by the overproduction/over consumption constant quantitative growth economic model.
We are speeding towards the edge of the cliff not only in terms of natural resources and sustainability, but even faster regarding human resources indicated by the growing unemployment (especially in youth) and growing social inequality, depression, alcohol and drug use, breakup of the social network including the classical family model worldwide.
We need to wake up and realize we are still part of the natural system we evolved from, and by which natural system's laws we still function as living creatures.
Humanity only has any kind of future if we learn to re-adapt to the natural system, becoming partners with it instead of behaving like viruses or cancer, destroying the whole system.

I think this article is misleading for any reader as it gives an impression that renewable energy from biomass is obtained from wood cut from forests.

As a clarification, I would like to state that the 'biomass' that is encouraged for energy generation is not that obtained from cutting down forests. The biomass that constitutes towards renewable energy is 'renewable biomass'. 'Renewable Biomass' is defined by UNFCCC and is essentially the biomass residues or products that do not cause any decrease in the carbon pools. Examples of this may be husk, bagasse or even non-fossil fraction of industrial or municipal waste. Further, this biomass should not result in a net competing use of biomass in the region. Thus, it defines renewable biomass that does not involve cutting down of any wood which has the potential of capturing more carbon or would 'take a long time to absorb CO2 emissions'. In fact, it refers to dead organic matter/waste/rejects that have no further potential of carbon capture and are, thus, only releasing 'the carbon sucked up during their growth'.

Also, most countries have restrictions on cutting on forest wood and in fact have strict regulations to this effect and so, the same regulators would never certify energy from forest wood as renewable.

You state "solar and wind power are inherently unreliable – we still need electricity on cloudy days or when the wind dies down," which seems intuitively true and holds itself to be true; however, is there no possible to solution to this problem, that is to ensure the supply of these particular renewable energies are steadily available and consistently meet and grow with the demand? For example, perhaps more efficient battery technologies that can be used to store the surplus energy produced on sunny or windy days? I don't know the what the limits of battery technologies are, but I do hope that one day efficient batteries will be created that can even store long-term reserves of these energy source. However, I imagine on this point about battery technologies the fact that extraction and production of the materials needed are incredibly toxic activities that have damaging effects on the environment and human health. Perhaps you are much more informed on this topic and can direct me to sources?

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